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ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT /- 
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI if OCTOBER 2, 1907 ^ ' 



^W" 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1907 



. 0. 



Er'-j<^o 



It is a very real pleasure to address 
this body of citizens of Missouri here in 
the great city of St. Louis. I have often 
visited St. Louis before, but always by 
rail. Now I am visiting it in the course 
of a trip by water, a trip on the great 
natural highway which runs past your 
very doors — a highway once so impor- 

(3) 



4 

tant, now almost abandoned, which I 

hope this nation will see not only restored 
to all its former usefulness, but given a 
far greater degree of usefulness to corre- 
spond with the extraordinary growth in 
wealth and population of the Mississippi 
Valley. We have lived in an era of 
phenomenal railroad building. As routes 
for merchandise, the iron highways have 
completely supplanted the old wagon 
roads, and under their competition the 
importance of the water highways has 



5 
been much diminished. The growth of 

the railway system has been rapid all 
over the world, but nowhere so rapid as 
in the United States. Accompanying this 
there has grown in the United States 
a tendency toward the practically com- 
plete abandonment of the system of 
water transportation. Such a tendency is 
certainly not healthy and I am convinced 
that it will not be permanent. There are 
many classes of commodities, especially 
those which are perishable in their nature 

c 2 



6 

and where the value is high relatively to 

the bulk, which will always be carried by 
rail. But bulky commodities which are 
not of a perishable nature will always be 
specially suited for the conditions of water 
transport. To illustrate the truth of this 
statement it would only be necessary to 
point to the use of the canal system in 
many countries of the Old World ; but it 
can be illustrated even better by what has 
happened nearer home. The Great Lakes 
offer a prime example of the importance 



7 
of a good water highway for mercantile 

traffic. As the line of traffic runs through 

lakes, the conditions are in some respects 

different from what must obtain on even 

the most important river. Nevertheless, 

it is well to remember that a very large 

part of this traffic is conditioned upon an 

artificial waterway, a canal — the famous 

Soo. The commerce that passes through 

the Soo far surpasses in bulk and in value 

that of the Suez Canal. 

From every standpoint it is desirable 



8 

for the Nation to join in improving the 

greatest system of river highways within 
its borders, a system second only in im- 
portance to the highway afforded by the 
Great Lakes; the highways of the Missis- 
sippi and its great tributaries, such as the 
Missouri and Ohio. This river system 
traverses too many States to render it 
possible to leave merely to the States the 
task of fitting it for the greatest use of 
which it is capable. It is emphatically a 
national task, for this great river system 



9 

is itself one of our chief national assets. 

Within the last few years there has been 
an awakening in this country to the need 
of both the conservation and the develop- 
ment of our national resources under the 
supervision of and by the aid of the Fed- 
eral Government. This is especially true 



of all that concerns our running waters. 



On the mountains from which the springs 
start we are now endeavoring to preserve 
the forests which regulate the water sup- 
ply and prevent too startling variations 



lO 



between droughts and freshets. Below 



the mountains, in the high dry regions 
of the western plains, we endeavor to 
secure the proper utilization of the waters 
for irrigation. This is at the sources of 
the streams. Farther down, where they 
become navigable, our aim must be to try 
to develop a policy which shall secure the 
utmost advantage from the navigable 
waters. Finally, on the lower courses of 
the Mississippi, the Nation should do its 
full share in the work of levee building; 



II 

and, incidentally to its purpose of serving 

navigation, this will also prevent the ruin 
of alluvial bottoms by floods. Our knowl- 
edge is not sufficiently far advanced to 
enable me to speak definitely as to the 
plans which should be adopted ; but let me 
say one word of warning : The danger of 
entering on any such scheme lies in the 
adoption of impossible and undesirable 
plans, plans the adoption of which means 
an outlay of money extravagant beyond 
all proportion to the return, or which. 



12 

though feasible, are not, relatively to other 
plans, of an importance which warrant their 
adoption. It will not be easy to secure 
the assent of a fundamentally cautious 
people like our own to the adoption of 
such a policy as that I hope to see adopted ; 
and even if we begin to follow out such a 
policy it certainly will not be persevered 
in if it is found to entail reckless extrava- 
gance or to be tainted with jobbery. The 
interests of the Nation as a whole must 
be always the first consideration. 



13 

This is properly a national movement, 

because all interstate and foreign com- 
merce, and the improvements and methods 
of carrying it on, are subjects for national 
action. Moreover, while of course the 
matter of the improvement of the Missis- 
sippi River and its tributaries is one which 
especially concerns the great middle por- 
tion of our country, the region between 
the Alleghenies and the Rockies, yet it is 
of concern to the rest of the country 
also, for it can not too often be said that 

c — i 



whatever is really beneficial to one part of 
our country is ultimately of benefit to the 
whole. Exactly as it is a good thing for 
the interior of our country that the sea- 
ports on the Atlantic and the Pacific and 
the Gulf should be safe and commodious, 
so it is to the interest of the dwellers on 
the coast that the interior should possess 
ample facilities for the transportation of 
its products. Our interests are all closely 
interwoven, and in the long run it will be 
found that we go up or go down together. 



15 

Take, for instance, the Panama Canal. 

If the Mississippi is restored to its former 
place of importance as a highway of com- 
merce, then the building of the Panama 
Canal will be felt as an immediate advan- 
tage to the business of every city and 
country district in the Mississippi Valley. 
I think that the building of that canal will 
be of especial advantage to the States that 
lie along the Pacific and the States that 
lie along the Gulf; and yet, after all, I feel 
that the advantage will be shared in an 



i6 

only less degree by the States of the inte- 
rior and of the Alantic coast. In other 
words, it is a thoroughly national work, 
undertaken for and redounding to the 
advantage of all of us — to the advantage of 
the Nation as a whole. Therefore I am 
glad to be able to report to you how well 
we are doing with the canal. There is 
bound to be a certain amount of experi- 
ment, a certain amount of feeling our way, 
in a task so gigantic — a task greater than 
any of its kind that has ever hitherto been 



17 

undertaken in the whole history of man- 
kind; but the success so far has been 
astonishing, and we have not met 
with a single one of the accidents 
or drawbacks which I freely confess I 
expected we should from time to time 
encounter. We, in the first place, laid the 
foundation for the work by securing the 
most favorable possible conditions as re- 
gard the health, comfort, and safety of 
the men who were to do it; and now the 

Canal Zone is in point of health better 
c — 5 



i8 
off than the average district of the same 

size at home. Then we went at the prob- 
lem of the actual digging and dam build- 
ing. For over a year past we have been 
engaged in making the dirt fly in good 
earnest, and the output of the giant steam 
shovels has steadily increased. It is now 
the rainy season, when work is most dif- 
ficult on the Isthmus, yet in the month of 
August last we excavated over a million 
and two hundred thousand cubic yards of 
earth and rock, a greater amount than in 



19 

any previous month. If we are able to 

keep up substantially the rate of progress 
that now obtains we shall finish the actual 
digging within five or six years; though 
when we come to the great Gatun dam and 
locks, while there is no question as to the 
work being feasible, there are several ele- 
ments entering into the time problem 
which make it unwise at present to hazard 
a prophecy in reference thereto. 

Now, gentlemen, this leads me up to- 
another matter for national consideration. 



20 

and that is our Navy. The Navy is not 
primarily of importance only to the coast 
regions. It is every bit as much the con- 
cern of the farmer who dwells a thousand 
miles from sea water as of the fisherman 
who makes his living on the ocean, for it 
is the concern of every good American who 
knows what the meaning of the word pa- 
triotism is. This country is definitely com- 
mitted to certain fundamental policies — to 
the Monroe doctrine, for instance, and to 
the duty not only of building, but, when it 



21 

is built, of policing and defending the Pan- 
ama Canal. We have definitely taken our 
place among the great world powers, and 
it would be a sign of ignoble weakness, 
having taken such a place, to shirk its re- 
sponsibilities. Therefore, unless we are 
willing to abandon this place, to abandon 
our insistence upon the Monroe doctrine, 
to give up the Panama Canal, and to be 
content to acknowledge ourselves a weak 
and timid nation, we must steadily build 

up and maintain a great fighting Navy. 
c — 6 



22 

Our Navy is already so efficient as to be a 
matter of just pride to every American. 
So long as our Navy is no larger than at 
present, it must be considered as an ele- 
mentary principle that the bulk of our 
battle fleet must always be kept together. 
When the Panama Canal is built it can be 
transferred without difficulty from one part 
of our coast to the other; but even before 
that canal is built it ought to be thus trans- 
ferred to and fro from time to time. In 
a couple of months our fleet of great 



23 

armored ships starts for the Pacific. Cali- 
fornia, Oregon, and Washington have a 
coast line which is our coast line just as 
emphatically as the coast line of New York 
and Maine, of Louisiana and Texas. Our 
fleet is going to its own home waters in the 
Pacific, and after a stay there it will return 
to its own home waters in the Atlantic. 
The best place for a naval officer to learn 
his duties is at sea, by performing them, and 
only by actually putting through a voyage 
of this nature, a voyage longer than any 



I 



24 

ever before undertaken by as large a fleet 
of any nation, can we find out just exactly 
what is necessary for us to know as to our 
naval needs and practice our officers and 
enlisted men in the highest duties of their 
profession. Among all our citizens there 
is no body of equal size to whom we owe 
quite as much as to the officers and 
enlisted men of the Army and Navy 
of the United States, and I bespeak 
from you the fullest and heartiest sup- 
port, in the name of our Nation and of 



25 

our flag, for the services to which these 
men belong. 

In conclusion I wish to say a word to 
this body, containing as it does so many 
business men, upon what is preeminently 
a business proposition, and that is the 
proper national supervision and control of 
corporations. At the meeting of the Amer- 
ican Bar Association in this last August, 
Judge Charles F. Amidon, of North 
Dakota, read a paper on the Nation and the 
Constitution so admirable that it is deserv- 

c 7 



26 

ing of very wide study; for what he said 
was, as all studies of law in its highest 
form ought to be, a contribution to con- 
structive jurisprudence as it should be 
understood not only by judges but by 
legislators, not only by those who inter- 
pret and decide the law, but by those who 
make it and who administer or execute 
it. He quoted from the late Justice 
Miller, of the Supreme Court, to show 
that even in the interpretation of the 
Constitution by this, the highest authority 



27 

of the land, the court's successive decisions 
must be tested by the way they work in 
actual application to the National life; the 
court adding to its thought and study the re- 
sults of experience and observation until the 
true solution is evolved by a process both 
of inclusion and exclusion. Said Justice 
Miller: "The meaning of the Constitution is 
to be sought as much in the National life 
as in the dictionary;" for, as has been well 
said, government purely out of a law library 
can never be really good government. 



28 

Now that the questions of government 
are becoming so largely economic, the ma- 
jority of our so-called constitutional cases 
really turn not upon the interpretation of 
the instrument itself, but upon the construc- 
tion, the right apprehension of the living 
conditions to which it is to be applied. The 
Constitution is now and must remain what 
it always has been; but it can only be inter- 
preted as the interests of the whole people 
demand, if interpreted as a living organism, 
designed to meet the conditions of life and 



29 

not of death; in other words, if interpreted 
as Marshall interpreted it, as Wilson de- 
clared it should be interpreted. The Mar- 
shall theory, the theory of life and not of 
death, allows to the Nation, that is to the 
people as a whole, when once it finds a 
subject within the national cognizance, the 
widest and freest choice of methods for 
national control, and sustains every exer- 
cise of national power which has any rea- 
sonable relation to national objects. The 
negation of this theory means, for instance, 



30 

that the Nation — that we, the ninety 

millions of people of this country — will be 
left helpless to control the huge corpora- 
tions which now domineer in our industrial 
life, and that they will have the authority of 
the courts to work their desires unchecked; 
and such a decision would in the end be 
as disastrous for them as for us. If the 
theory of the Marshall school prevails, then 
an immense field of national power, now 
unused, will be developed, which will be 
adequate for dealing with many, if not all. 



31 

of the economic problems which vex us ; 

and we shall be saved from the ominous 
threat of a constant oscillation between 
economic tyranny and economic chaos. 
Our industrial, and therefore our social, 
future as a Nation depends upon settling 
aright this urgent question. 

The Constitution is unchanged and 
unchangeable save by amendment in due 
form. But the conditions to which it is to 
be applied have undergone a change which 
is almost a transformation, with the result 



32 

that many subjects formerly under the 
control of the States have come under the 
control of the Nation. As one of the jus- 
tices of the Supreme Court has recently 
said: "The growth of national powers, 
underourConstitution, which marks merely 
the great outlines and designates only the 
great objects of national concern, is to be 
compared to the growth of a country not 
by the geographical enlargement of its 
boundaries, but by the increase of its pop- 
ulation." A hundred years ago there was. 



33 

except the commerce which crawled along 

our seacoast or up and down our interior 
waterways, practically no interstate com- 
merce. Now, by the railroad, the mails, 
the telegraph, and the telephone an im- 
mense part of our commerce is interstate. 
By the transformation it has escaped from 
the power of the State and come under the 
power of the Nation. Therefore there has 
been a great practical change in the exer- 
cise of the National power, under the acts 
of Congress, over interstate commerce; 



34 

while on the other hand there has been no 

noticeable change in the exercise of the 
National power "to regulate commerce 
with foreign nations and with the Indian 
tribes." The change as regards interstate 
commerce has been, not in the Constitu- 
tion, but in the business of the people to 
which it is to be applied. Our economic 
and social future depends in very large 
part upon how the interstate commerce 
power of the Nation is interpreted. 

I believe that the Nation has the whole 



35 

governmental power over interstate com- 
merce and the widest discretion in deal- 
ing with that subject ; of course under the 
express limits prescribed in the Constitu- 
tion for the exercise of all powers, such for 
instance as the condition that " due process 
of law" shall not be denied. The Nation 
has no direct power over purely intrastate 
commerce, even where it is conducted by 
the same agencies which conduct inter- 
state commerce. The courts must deter- 
mine what is national and what is State 



36 

commerce. The same reasoning which 

sustained the power of Congress to incor- 
porate the United States Bank tends to 
sustain the power to incorporate an inter- 
state railroad, or any other corporation 
conducting an interstate business. 



There are difficulties arising from our 



dual form of government. If they prove 
to be insuperable resort must be had to 
the power of amendment. Let us first 
try to meet them by an exercise of all the 
powers of the National Government which 



37 
in the Marshall spirit of broad interpretation 

can be found in the Constitution as it is. 
They are of vast extent. The chief eco- 
nomic question of the day in this country 
is to provide a sovereign for the great 
corporations engaged in interstate busi- 
ness; that is, for the railroads and the 
interstate industrial corporations. At the 
moment our prime concern is with the 
railroads. When railroads were first built 
they were purely local in character. 
Their boundaries were not coextensive 



38 

even with the boundaries of one State. 

They usually covered but two or three 
counties. All this has now changed. At 
present five great systems embody nearly 
four-fifths of the total mileage of the 
country. All the most important rail- 
roads are no longer State roads, but in- 
struments of interstate commerce. Prob- 
ably 85 per cent of their business is 
interstate business. It is the Nation alone 
which can with wisdom, justice, and ef- 
fectiveness exercise over these interstate 



39 
railroads the thorough and complete su- 
pervision which should be exercised. One 
of the chief, and probably the chief, of the 
domestic causes for the adoption of the 
Constitution was the need to confer upon 
the Nation exclusive control over inter- 
state commerce. But this grant of power 
is worthless unless it is held to confer 
thoroughgoing and complete control over 
practically the sole instrumentalities of 
interstate commerce — the interstate rail- 
roads. The railroads themselves have been 



40 

exceedingly shortsighted in the rancorous 

bitterness which they have shown against 
the resumption by the Nation of this long- 
neglected power. Great capitalists, who 
pride themselves upon their extreme con- 
servatism, often believe they are acting in 
the interests of property when following a 
course so shortsighted as to be really an 
assault upon property. They have shown 
extreme unwisdom in their violent oppo- 
sition to the assumption of complete con- 
trol over the railroads by the Federal Gov- 



41 

ernment The American people will not 

tolerate the happy-go-lucky system of no 
control over the great interstate railroads, 
with the insolent and manifold abuses 
which have so generally accompanied it. 
The control must exist somewhere; and 
unless it is by thoroughgoing and radical 
law placed upon the statute books of the 
Nation, it will be exercised in ever-increas- 
ing measure by the several States. The 
same considerations which made the foun- 
ders of the Constitution deem it imperative 



42 

that the Nation should have complete con- 
trol of interstate commerce apply with pe- 
culiar force to the control of interstate rail- 
roads at the present day; and the argu- 
ments of Madison of Virginia, Pinckney 
of South Carolina, and Hamilton and Jay 
of New York, in their essence apply now 
as they applied one hundred and twenty 
years ago. 

The national convention which framed 
the Constitution, and in which almost all 
the most eminent of the first generation 



43 
of American statesmen sat, embodied the 

theory of the instrument in a resolution, 
to the effect that the National Government 
should have power in cases where the 
separate States were incompetent to act 
with full efficiency, and where the har- 
mony of the United States would be 
interrupted by the exercise of such indi- 
vidual legislation. The interstate railroad 
situation is exactly a case in point There 
will, of course, be local matters affecting 
railroads which can best be dealt with by 



44 
local authority, but as national commercial 

agents the big interstate railroad ought to 

be completely subject to national authority. 

Only thus can we secure their complete 

subjection to, and control by, a single 

sovereign, representing the whole people, 

and capable both of protecting the public 

and of seeing that the railroads neither 

inflict nor endure injustice. 

Personally I firmly believe that there 

should be national legislation to control 

all industrial corporations doing an inter- 



45 
state business, including the control of the 

output of their securities, but as to these 
the necessity for Federal control is less 
urgent and immediate than is the case 
with the railroads. Many of the abuses 
connected with these corporations will 
probably tend to disappear now that 
the Government — the public — is grad- 
ually getting the upper hand as re 
gards putting a stop to the rebates and 
special privileges which some of these 
corporations have enjoyed at the hands of 



46 

the common carriers. But ultimately it 

will be found that the complete remedy 
for these abuses lies in direct and affirma- 
tive action by the National Government. 
That there is constitutional power for the 
national regulation of these corporations I 
have myself no question. Two or three 
generations ago there was just as much 
hostility to national control of banks as 
there is now to national control of railroads 
or of industrial corporations doing an inter- 
state business. That hostility now seems 



47 
to us ludicrous in its lack of warrant; in like 

manner, gentlemen, our descendants will 
regard with wonder the present opposition 
to giving the National Government ade- 
quate power to control those great corpo- 
rations, which it alone can fully, and yet 
wisely, safely, and justly control. Remem- 
ber also that to regulate the formation of 
these corporations offers one of the most 
direct and efficient methods of regulating 
their activities. 

I am not pleading for an extension of 



48 
constitutional power. I am pleading that 

constitutional power which already exists 
shall be applied to new conditions which 
did not exist when the Constitution went 
into being. I ask that the national powers 
already conferred upon the National Gov- 
ernment by the Constitution shall be so 
used as to bring national commerce and 
industry effectively under the authority of 
the Federal Government and thereby avert 
industrial chaos. My plea is not to bring 
about a condition of centralization. It is 



49 
that the Government shall recognize a con- 
dition of centralization in a field where it 
already exists. When the national bank- 
ing law was passed it represented in reality 
not centralization, but recognition of the 
fact that the country had so far advanced 
that the currency was already a matter of 
National concern and must be dealt with 
by the central authority at Washington. 
So it is with interstate industrialism and 
especially with the matter of interstate rail- 
road operation to-day. Centralization has 



50 
already taken place in the world of com- 
merce and industry. All I ask is that the 
National Government look this fact in the 
face, accept it as a fact, and fit itself accord- 
ingly for a policy of supervision and con- 
trol over this centralized commerce and 
industry. 






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